Scratch Neukölln

Scratch Neukölln

A production by Constanza Macras I Dorky Park. With the friendly support of Freudenberg Stitung and Freundeskreis des Hebbel – Theaters e.V.

Summary

Erroll Morris interviews a man who went through high school in its most difficult form, as a suburban genius with pimples and a sunken chest. His IQ tests in the 1 percentile, but when high school ends, he wants only one thing, and that is to do it again. He breaks into school, steals his own records, changes his name and even his grades, changing them from A to B-. He does this so that he can go back to high school, and ‘this time do it right, to be the cool guy, not the smart guy.’ He enters a new high school and repeats his senior year, graduates again, and then goes back again to a new school, with a different name. He goes to high school until he is 27 years old, shaving three times a day in order to appear young. He experiences this as time travel and the only landscape in it is his own ego.

‘Scratch Neukoelln’, the project by Constanza Macras, absorbs these experiences into an exploration of the longing to fit in, about dreams and small attempts to escape from everyday life.

2003, and globalization is both the disease and the cure. A group of people – some younger, some older – converge in Neukšlln. They are there to start over, to start from scratch. They are there to escape and erase the past. No one knows who they were, where they came from, what language they belong to. Neukoelln is already full of these people. This new group does not know that they all have the same agenda, the same purpose. They will start over where they started once before. With a new language come new stories, and from stories, history starts over. They bring languages to the table, they bring CDs that have been copied from copies of CDs, they bring dance moves that have traveled from one street to another, beamed by a SAT1 satellite. These copies of copies get copied further, written over as they start again. At no point should it ever be clear what comes from what, or in which direction.
The project is called ‘Scratch Neukölln’ as in scratch paper, scratch disk, as in starting from scratch. As in a longstanding itch, relieved.